Comparison of methods for the proportion of true null hypotheses in microarray studies

We consider estimating the proportion of true null hypotheses in multiple testing problems. A traditional multiple testing rate, family-wise error rate is too conservative and old to control type I error in multiple testing setups; however, false discovery rate (FDR) has received significant attention in many research areas such as GWAS data, FMRI data, and signal processing. Identify differentially expressed genes in microarray studies involves estimating the proportion of true null hypotheses in FDR procedures. However, we need to account for unknown dependence structures among genes in microarray data in order to estimate the proportion of true null hypothesis since the genuine dependence structure of microarray data is unknown. We compare various procedures in simulation data and real microarray data. We consider a hidden Markov model for simulated data with dependency. Cai procedure (2007) and a sliding linear model procedure (2011) have a relatively smaller bias and standard errors, being more proper for estimating the proportion of true null hypotheses in simulated data under various setups. Real data analysis shows that 5 estimation procedures among 9 procedures have almost similar values of the estimated proportion of true null hypotheses in microarray data.